This invention relates to wood chips and is more particularly concerned with a wood chip product and a process of producing the same.
In the past timber, which is to be used for pulpwood, has been transported as equal length and size, debarked logs to a pulp mill where the logs were then processed into chips for further treatment to produce the cellulosic pulp fibres from which the paper was made. This, of course, entailed cutting, delimbing and debarking each tree in the field. Such an operation, to be economical, required, as a rule, the systematic growing and systematic harvesting of a single species of tree. The operation also required chipping in the pulp mill.
When land is cleared, many types and sizes of trees are cut. Therefore, such an operation does not lend itself well to the production of trees for pulp purposes. Instead, these trees are usually burned or hauled away and discarded or segregated and sold for different purposes. Recently, with the advent of the large wood chipper capable of progressively chipping whole trees including their limbs, the conversion of such trees directly into chips, on the site, has become increasingly popular. Such chips are either blown directly onto the ground or, blown, as non-compressed loose chips, into closeable truck vans for transportation to a paper mill. Such transportation, by van, is so costly that only short hauls of the chips are feasible. Indeed, even when stored in the hole of a freighter, the transportation of loose chips is presently so costly that such chips can not be economically employed by a pulp mill.